FLOWER ATLAS A Reimagined Calendar: Every Day, a Flower Is in Bloom Somewhere on Earth — 365 Days in 72 Microseasons
The Flower Atlas Project reconceptualizes time through a botanical lens, presenting the calendar year as a sequence of 365 distinct flowers—each one in bloom on a specific day, somewhere on the planet.
Functioning simultaneously as a botanical compendium, a visual encyclopedia, and a cultural rosetta stone linking Eastern and Western calendrical systems, The Flower Atlas Project proposes an alternative way of measuring time—one that rejects the linear rigidity of the dominant Western (Gregorian) calendar in favor of a cyclical, ecologically grounded temporality. This alternative calendar replaces conventional systems with one grounded in seasonal, phenological, and planetary rhythms. It is attuned to the subtle, seasonally specific changes that shape the natural world.
The project draws on the ancient Japanese calendar of 72 Kō, or microseasons—a highly nuanced system rooted in close observation of the natural world. This calendar evolved from an earlier framework: the 24 seasonal solar terms (Sekki), developed over 2,500 years ago in China. Rather than dividing the year into abstract increments, the Kō calendar names each five-day season for specific environmental phenomena—such as “The Wild Geese Return North” (April 10–14) or “Thunder Lowers Its Voice” (September 23–27). These brief intervals offer a poetic and phenological structure for understanding time as it is experienced through the senses and the seasons.
The primary form of The Flower Atlas Project is a 72-page calendar created for the year 2023. Each page corresponds to one of the 72 microseasons and includes the color of each flower in bloom during that five-day period, along with the flower’s name, its location of bloom on Earth, and the lunar phase for each date. The calendar serves as a document of the year as seen through phenological cues, aligning botanical and astronomical data with a global, observational record of time.
In the same year, The Flower Atlas Project was also realized as a large-scale public art installation commissioned by Brookfield Place in New York City. The work featured 72 fabric banners, each measuring 54 x 300 inches, suspended in sequence throughout the atrium. Each banner represented one of the 72 microseasons and displayed the color of each flower in bloom on each day within that interval.